Test Your API
Testing Made Easy
Unit Tests are absolutely crucial to ensuring that your API doesn’t have any backwards compatibility breaks and meets all of your current requirements. With RAML you’re able to describe your HTTP REST API in such a way that it’s possible to generate many of those tests for you!!!
This means that after defining your spec, you’re able to take advantage of TDD (Test Driven Development) and have automatically generated tests in your CI (Continuous Integration) environments.
Popular Testing Tools
There are several tools that you can use to generate tests with RAML, including many available for free in the community, and other far more extensive testing services offered through companies such as API Science and SmartBear.
Abao
Abao is a NodeJS command-line tool for testing API documentation written in RAML format against its backend implementation. With Abao you can easily plug your API documentation into the Continuous Integration system like Travis CI or Jenkins and have API documentation up-to-date, all the time. Abao uses Mocha (http://mochajs.org/) for judging if a particular API response is valid or if is not.
Vigia
Vigia is an adaptable API integration test suite which supports test generation based on a RAML definition file.
Postman
Postman is one of the most popular API calling and testing tools used by developers today. Freely available as a Chrome app, Postman supports API calls to any RESTful API and lets you setup scripts and tests after importing your RAML spec.
Popular Testing Services
API Fortress
API Fortress provides testing by checking latency and response speeds within your API. With API Fortress you can also validate responses and payloads to ensure that whether in dev or production your API is functioning correctly. On top their services, API Fortress offers their own API - letting you test your API on demand.
API Science
API Science offers worldwide monitoring and testing of your API to identify performance issues, outages, errors. With API Science you’re able to test multiple aspects of your HTTP based REST API including JSON, OAuth, and XML. You can even test real, advanced CRUD sequences in production and receive alerts via Slack, PagerDuty, or via web hooks.
SmartBear
SmartBear offers a large suite of testing tools for your API, letting you pull in your RAML spec to identify latency/ speed issues, errors, and verify response data. Along with API Readiness tools, they also offer API Virtualization, Continuous Integration tooling, and Performance testing.